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Do you think a pastel painter needs thousands of pastel sticks to be able to paint? Not entirely so.

 

Recently I took up a challenge to paint with 12 colours plus black and white, and someone commented that it looked very much like my usual painting style, so where was the challenge?

 

Hm, yes, that was after all basically true.

 

The Challenger had painted with only three colours (+ black and white), so I took him up on that.

 

Don't tell him, but I did choose to design the scene so it would fit the very limited number of colours...

 

As I worked on a fairly darkish paper, I knew I would get better results with toning the light areas with white before starting. And then I chose black to darken the dark areas. The black and white underpainting makes a huge difference. It (the finished sketch) would have been more colourful if I had used the colours for the underpainting. But I prefer to have whites and blacks under the colours.

 

 

The turning fish is my chosen area of interest. But it doesn't stand (swim!) as an isolated blob in the midst of darkness. I have hinted at things growing, and things being reflected in the surface, so there is a visual path, a movement, combining the fish and the other light elements in the painting.

 

Now, why do people maintain that a pastel painter really needs thousands of sticks?

 

I have two theories about that: a) people think it is easier to search for just the right stick of just the right nuance, and b) if one starts painting with pastels, one has not learned to mix colour in a wet medium.

 

My personal answer to a) is that it can be quicker to modify the colour you have with another colour, and it is easier to carry a more limited palette. To b) I suggest some serious work mixing colours and learning how they behave. I started painting in oils, and did extensive studies of colour mixing. There are no quick fixes, knowledge must be earned by hard work.

 

So three colours work for pastel painters too. Admittedly, it isn't easy, but that palette of 14 sticks in the previous blog post are quite enough. OK, I'd like to expand on that, a little bit, for convenience's sake. But still, some 30 sticks are nowhere near the two thousand some recommend.

 

Good news! Sketches and studies -- and experiments -- have a new section on my website, and they are half the price of finished paintings!

 

After a very busy time with classes, exhibition, and commissions, I could try out my investment in a small set of the fabled Henri Roche pastel, made by La Maison du Pastel in Paris, France. Handmade with methods that are centuries old, these are the most luxurious pastels that exist. It is the pastel brand used by Degas, Monet, Rosabla Carriera, and other famous old masters.

 

After carefully selecting 36 pastels in mainly 3 values (3, 5, 7), plus a couple of darks and some near whites, I eagerly waited for the postman to bring it. Hovering by the window, waiting for him, I rushed out and grabbed it from his hands before he could drop it in the box.

 

When opening the parcel, I found several neat cardboard boxes with the cool logo of Henri Roché...

 

 

... and inside them were glorious colours!

 

The "candy boxes" sat for a while, being just pretty, while I was working with business related things. Finally I found some free time to paint "Old Town Glow (Stockholm)". In order to have a greater variation of strokes, I  broke off (gasp!) about a third from the long sticks. (Below: some sticks photograph as if the colours were similar. In reality, they are different, except the lemon yellow which is a duplicate.)

 

 

  During my earlier experiments with a sample set, I had made a discovery: the Henri Roché pastels respond very well to a high quality fixative, which allows for multiple layering on what I call plain pastel paper. This pastel, the Henri Roché, is what allowd Degas to create his fantastic shimmering paintings. (See my article for The Pastel Scribbler on discovering Dega's "secret" method, as I reviewed the Roché pastel.)

 

Here is a closeup showing the rough texture of a Degas painting (left), and a detail from my own (right), with a similar texture:

 

 

This typical texture can only be had when fixating between layers. I'm talking about a light fixation, not a drenching of the pastel. If a firmer layer is needed, do spray fixative in a light application, let it dry completely, repeat as many times as needed. I find that about two light applications is usually sufficient.

 

What this technique does is that it allows you to layer just about any colour on top of any other, without mixing them. Degas has let an olivy green and a rosy pink layer into each other, and while the optical mixing does show a certain greyness, both colours are vibrant as they mingle in the eye. Blending these would have resulted in a much duller grey.

 

Can you do that with other brands of pastels? Not as well, in my opinion. In other brands, the pastel dust tends to melt and darken much more, and fuse. The Roché pastel marks may darken a hair depending on if there is a darker colour underneath, but the marks keep their individuality and vibrancy.

 

I still explore the Henri Roché pastels, as they behave differently from other pastels. I will try them on other papers, too, as for example Ingres. In this painting, I applied light scumbling strokes, while the strokes in the sketches in the article were more impressionistic.

 

Larger version of Old Town Glow (Stockholm) is found here.

The luxurious pastel stick Henri Roché, found at La Maison du Pastel in Paris, France, is something pastel painters are curious about. Recently, I tested seven colours of the brand.

 

 

While I was sketching and preparing the review, I found something really exciting about these pastels -- they allow you to layer and fix between layers just as Edgar Degas did! His methods are known, but we modern pastellists find that we have difficulties making his method work, as the pastel pigments on the paper tend to "melt" and "fuse" when fixative is applied heavily, or get "spotty" when it is sprayed on lightly, and the light pastels darken considerably regardless of method.

 

The Roché pastels remain almost exactly as they were when fixative is applied. Very impressive.

 

In the Review, I test the pastels on three different papers and show images with closeups.

 

Read the Roché Review here.  (Originally written for The Pastel Scribbler, the newsletter of the Pastel Guild of Europe.)

 

 

This painting, With a View, is painted with the relatively new type of super soft pastel that doesn't come as a stick, but in a pan, looking much like a large eyeshadow pan. It is developed by an artist, and you can read more about them at the PanPastel site.

Pastel sticks come in many different brands. For a year, I've mostly painted with Rembrandt and Schmincke -- both good quality brands. The Rembrandts are a rather firm pastel that work well on almost any surface -- my workhorse pastel. Schmincke's pastels are like 'whipped cream', as they are supersoft, and can give a very decent impasto effect. I've used them over the Rembrandt's, because I'm a tad heavy handed, so I've needed to not fill the tooth of the paper too quickly.

But I felt I also wanted a brand that was somewhere between those two in relative hardness, so I decided to test the UK brand Unisons and got their Dark Jewels set, and their Special set. I realy liked the pigment intensity, and them being both soft and firm enough, so I got a 72-stick set with mostly what some call chromatic colours (those of the rainbow), and while I was at it, the set of Turquoises was so delicious so it somehow jumped into the shopping basket, and took the Orange set along. :-) With some extras, this is how my Unison collection looks right now: 

 Oh, yes, a set of Lights sneaked into the order, too.

The Starter set (the large one at the back of the pic) is organized in a way that I find impressive and like a lot: In the middle, there are the most pigment-saturated sticks, with lighter version towards top and bottom.




If we take the 3rd row from the right, the greens, there is a progression from the middle upwards of lighter and cooler greens, while down-wards the progression is ligher and warmer. This is really brilliant, because when white is added to a colour, it cools, dulls, and lighten (or whiten) them, which makes even warm colours go very cool the lighter the tint is. The maker of Unisons does what I did when painting with oils -- he adds a bit of yellow to the green (either together with white or yellow only) to warm it.




Visually the progression from darker to lighter *warm* greens is way more satisfying than mere tints. The lightest and yellowest are newsprung leaves in spring sunshine, while the more saturated warm greens are summer foliage in sunlight. On the cooler side, the greens are 'dustier' and look like foliage during an overcast or cloudy day. Extremely usable system, in my opinion.

To test the new sets of Unisons, I painted a vignette of a rose, on black Canson Mi-Teintes:

 (Larger version on the website.)

The Unisons performed wonderfully. As I layer and crosshatch a lot, creating my own colour-vibrations, I was really pleased with the fact that I could add several more layers than I'd even hoped for. The different colours 'married' really well, not creating anything resembling 'mud', but only rich vibrant colour. What more can one ask for?

Now, I only really need some special Terry Ludwigs, and that beautiful Flinder's Violet from ArtSpectrum.... Plenty is never enough for most pastellists.